2012 - Britney May was a short girl with a nose-piercing and multi-colored hair. She had a penchant for laughing and texting while I did my best to engage and challenge her and her classmates my first year teaching at a small school in South Carolina. It had been a rough first year of trial and error, sleepless nights of curriculum planning, and a relentless pursuit to get my students from this impoverished rural community to work hard and maintain high expectations for themselves.
At the end of that first year, Britney wrote a letter to me: “No other teacher at our school has ever given us this much work. We’re not used to having a teacher here who cares so much about us and our grades. You’re an amazing teacher, and you’ve really helped me appreciate history.”
Britney had described something I had sought to create for students like her early on in my life. In fact, my desire to be an advocate for high-quality public education began developing back when I attended a low-income rural school located in the predominately poor and African-American community of Blackville, South Carolina. With encouragement from a few special teachers, I applied to Duke. To this day, perhaps the most life-changing event for me was being notified that I was selected to be one of Duke’s Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholarship recipients. Not only did I have the opportunity to attend one of the best schools in the world on a scholarship, I also would be joining a community of remarkable Duke scholars committed to social justice.
When I arrived at Duke, I became that much more aware of the severe educational inequalities in this country. That only further ignited my interests. I learned quickly, however, that a career in education at Duke was not exactly in vogue. Most of the folks I befriended during my early years at Duke spoke of dreams in banking, medicine, engineering, or other high-paying, elite professions. I convinced myself that I should follow suit, enrolling in classes in which I found myself miserable—not the least bit interesting or connected to what I knew I cared about most.
Then I took Professor Laura Edwards’ “Women’s History in America” course. It was one of my first history courses, and it was in that class that I was first critically exposed to the idea of a historical narrative that countered dominant ideas of the United States’ development and its place in the world. I became fascinated with researching primary sources, writing, encountering alternative histories, and confronting the traditional white, male-dominated historical account. After that course, I knew I wanted to be a history teacher before I did anything else; I wanted to provide the same opportunities for students who often do not get a chance to study people with similar backgrounds to themselves. Through their incredible academic support, commitment to high-quality research and writing, and unmatched scholarship, my professors nurtured me to become a historian in my own right. For young people who often do not get such opportunities, I developed an intense desire to do the same.
After receiving my secondary-teaching certification from Duke and obtaining a graduate degree from Harvard, I decided to spend the next three years teaching history in underserved rural and urban communities, both nationally and internationally. As a part of this teaching career, many other opportunities have presented themselves. These have included writing an African-American history curriculum largely guided by John Hope Franklin’s work and spending a summer in New York studying Latino literature as a National Endowment for the Humanities summer scholar. What my teaching career has also done is open my eyes even more to the country’s complex issues of educational disparities rooted in factors of class and race, a deeper awareness that has largely influenced the next steps in my career.
I am currently in my third year teaching high school history and English at an urban school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Next year, I will be in law school continuing my career dedicated to addressing the education inequities in this country. Would I have found myself here had I not taken that women’s history course at Duke? Perhaps. I seriously doubt, however, that the path would have been nearly as gratifying or as valuable in terms of academic skills and intellectual cultivation.
And after all is said and done, I wouldn’t be surprised if I ultimately found myself back in a classroom attempting a discussion with fifteen-year-olds on the limitations of the Declaration of Independence or whether or not civil liberties should be suspended during time of war; helping students, like Britney, appreciate the study of history. This is what Duke did for me, and regardless of the profession I find myself in, I know I’m all the better for it. I am confident my students—past, present, and future—will be, too.
History
